Tom Hyman (42 page)

“I know.”

“How’s Genny?”

“Wonderful. As ever. More surprises every day.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’ve been working on Jupiter.”

“Working on it?” Ajemian’s tone was disbelieving.

“I’ve discovered a lot.”

A few beats of silence. “You have? Like what?”

“Jupiter has an access code. It won’t work without it.”

“You sure of that?”

“Quite sure.”

“The geneticists in Romania must know that.”

“I don’t think they do.”

“Do you know the right code?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find it out?”

Anne didn’t reply.

“Anne. How the hell do you know this? Who told you?”

“No one told me. I worked it out by myself.”

“Are you going to tell Dalton?”

“I wasn’t planning to. You can tell him if you want.”

“You’re kidding. He won’t believe it for a second.”

Anne laughed. “Well, just tell him I told you.” She could picture how Dalton would take the news—how incredulous and angry he would be.

Sweet revenge.

“Then he’ll know you have a copy of Jupiter. And he’ll assume I gave it to you.”

“Tell him the truth. Tell him I stole it.”

She heard Ajemian sigh.

“Well, tell him whatever you like. I really don’t care. You know my feelings. I don’t think anybody should have Jupiter. I don’t want anybody else to be used as a guinea pig the way I was. And especially I don’t want anybody using it just to make money.”

“I don’t know what to say, Anne.”

“When are those Romanian babies due?” she asked.

“About a month . . . maybe less. Are you positive it’ll go wrong?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What’ll happen?”

“I don’t know. But the babies probably won’t be normal.”

“If I could tell Dalton something about Goth’s code and how it works, he might believe me. You don’t have to tell me everything, Anne. Just give me some plausible details.”

“No,” Anne said, her voice firm. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“But you know how Dalton is. You’ve got to give me some plausible evidence. He won’t believe for a minute that you could possibly know anything about Jupiter.”

“You’re right, Hank. He probably won’t. We’ll let him learn the hard way.”

“You have to realize how desperate he is. He’s depending completely on Jupiter to save him. He doesn’t have anything else.

If he thinks you hold the key, he’ll do what he has to to get it from you.”

“I’m not afraid of Dalton, Hank.”

She could hear a long, drawn-out sigh of resignation on the other end of the line. “Okay. I’ll warn him. And I’ll tell him you told me.”

Anne sensed Ajemian’s despair. She didn’t share it. “Things will work out, Hank.”

“I don’t see how, Anne. Jesus, I really don’t see how.” Ajemian hung up.

Anne turned off the computer and the desk lamp and went to the window.

She opened the drapes and looked out. The first glimmers of dawn had settled a dim red glow on the tops of the roofs across the street.

Below, the rows of neatly fenced backyards were still sunk in a pale, ghostly gray. No one was abroad. The back windows of the brownstones across the way on Perry Street were all dark.

Except for one. On the top floor of the building directly opposite hers a shade on one window was raised partway up and the room inside was illuminated by a bright light. She had thought the apartment behind that window to be unoccupied.

She could see three men. They were standing around, talking casually, as if taking a break from their work. One was darkhaired and muscular, another red-headed and slight. The third man, older and taller than the other two, had a peculiar-looking long face, with big ears and close-set eyes. His hair was snow white and his skin dark black. She thought that she had seen him somewhere once before, a long time ago.

Mounted on tripods and clearly visible just inside the window were two large pairs of binoculars. Their lenses were pointed directly at her.

One pair appeared to have a camera attached to its back end. On a third tripod just behind the binoculars was what looked like a small TV

satellite dish. That was also pointed directly at her.

The call came in the middle of the night. Dr. Laura Garhardt groped in the dark for the telephone receiver and tried to clear the sleep from her throat. “Yes?”

“Doctor. It’s Franz Hartmann, at the clinic.”

“Yes, Franz.”

“One of our women in the pilot program was just brought in, about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Who?”

“Nadja Georgiescu.”

Garhardt sensed the anxiety in Hartmann’s voice. “What’s the matter?”

“She . . . We delivered her baby.”

“So soon?”

“It was stillborn.”

Dr. Garhardt pressed a hand over her eyes. “What was wrong?”

Hartmann didn’t answer immediately. Garhardt repeated the question.

“We don’t know,” he said. “You’d better come down.”

Garhardt threw on some clothes and hurried through the long, deserted corridors of the palace. Rather than wait for an elevator, she ran down the four flights of stairs and across the building’s main lobby to the wing in which they had installed the clinic.

Hartmann met her at the door to the delivery area. The tall young doctor’s face was grim.

“How is she?” Garhardt asked.

“Nadja? She’s all right. We gave her a tranquilizer and put her to bed.” Hartmann ushered Dr. Garhardt into a small laboratory down the hall from the OR and the delivery rooms.

“Over here,” Hartmann said, pointing toward the counter along the far wall. A bundled-up white cotton blanket lay on the black Formica surface. Large areas of it were covered with a mysterious dark brown stain.

Hartmann pulled the cloth aside to reveal the dead infant. Garhardt uttered an involuntary gasp, closed her eyes, then opened them and stared at the nine-pound baby boy lying inert and lifeless on its back, its eyes closed, its head turned to the side. One arm was stretched out, the fingers extended from its tiny hand, as if it had reached out to clutch at something during its last moments. Garhardt gently pushed the arm down against its side.

“I drew a blood sample,” Hartmann said. He tilted his head in the direction of the lab bench across the room, where two technicians, also just roused from sleep, were beginning work preparing the sample for tests.

Garhardt just nodded. The infant looked entirely normal.

Except for the color of its skin. It was a dark shade of blue.

Garhardt had a terrible premonition. She touched a patch of the chocolate-brown stain on the blanket. “Is this its blood?” she asked.

Hartmann nodded.

“Hemoglobin M,” she muttered.

Hartmann didn’t reply. He was watching her nervously, waiting for her to tell him what she wanted him to do.

“Take a mucus sample for DNA testing,” Garhardt said. “I need chromosome 11. Isolate and sequence the beta globin and the epsilon globin genes. As soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

“And get all the other women in the program in here immediately. Start calling them right now. I want blood and tissue samples taken from all the fetuses this morning. Run the same tests on the globin genes. Get the whole staff up. We need the results today. And keep the women here.”

J U p I e r s LJ a u g n l e r Hartmann went off to find the list of phone numbers for the other twenty-three women. He shouted at somebody to wake the second ambulance crew.

Garhardt took one last look at the inert form of the infant on the lab bench and then gently pulled the cotton blanket over it and went to her office to wait for the results of the testing.

The hours passed with a glacial slowness. Garhardt drank cup after cup of black coffee and alternately paced her office and stood by her windows, staring out at the snow-covered peaks of the Carpathian Mountains to the north. She filled a hypodermic syringe with a powerful tranquilizer and injected it into her forearm. It failed to still the panicky tumult boiling in her chest.

All during the early hours of the morning the pregnant Romanian women were brought in, undressed, and put to bed. Long needles probed into their uteruses and through the amniotic sacs to extract a few drops of blood and a few cells of tissue from the still-living embryos inside.

The blood and tissue samples were swiftly processed and analyzed.

It was late at night before the results were complete. They confirmed Garhardt’s worst fears. The fetuses of all twenty-four of the women in the test program had the same problem—an error in the genetic coding of the epsilon globin genes, causing them to produce a defective hemoglobin called hemoglobin M.

This same error sometimes occurred in natural circumstances, usually on a beta globin gene. Those who suffered from it had blue skin and blood the color of chocolate. Ordinarily they survived, because the mutation appeared in only one of the two copies of chromosome 11 that everyone was born with. But the tests of the twenty-four fetuses in Doctor Garhardt’s program all showed the identical flaw occurring on both copies of chromosome 11. The coding error was incredibly minute—one incorrect nucleotide sequence out of three billion. And it was absolutely fatal. Every single one of the fetuses would either be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Nothing could save them. They were the victims of a design flaw.

If she had been allowed the time and expense to subject Jupiter’s blueprints to the kinds of preliminary screening tests she had requested, all this might have been avoided, she thought.

Might have been avoided.

She would have checked Jupiter’s beta globin sequences for the kind of coding error that would produce hemoglobin M, but she might well have overlooked epsilon entirely. The epsilon globin gene functioned only during the first few weeks of an infants existence. Then it shut down entirely, leaving the task of hemoglobin production to the other globin genes, primarily beta.

The error was not an accident, Garhardt realized. The odds of forty-eight parents having identical flaws in the epsilon globin genes of their germ cells were so astronomically great as to be beyond the realm of the possible. The error was obviously in the Jupiter program itself. She satisfied herself on this point by running Jupiter through a new computer trial, using a male and a female genome whose globin genes were known to be normal.

From them, Jupiter produced a new genome with the same fatal error in the epsilon globin genes of both chromosome copies.

Sabotage, she thought.

But who had done it? Some disgruntled scientist here in the labs? Or had someone inserted the error earlier, in the original hard-disk copy of the program, before Garhardt—or even the baroness—had come into possession of it? Some employee of Stewart Biotech, in New York, perhaps?

What other possibilities remained? Dr. Harold Goth might have made the mistake himself a long time ago, when he first encoded the program to a computer disk. But there was the Stewart daughter, Genevieve.

She had not suffered from hemoglobin M, or, if her tests were to be believed, any other disorder.

Could the Stewart child be a fraud? Garhardt had never actually seen her or tested her herself.

Speculation was useless. It didn’t matter anymore. It was the baroness’s reaction that would matter. A preventable mistake had been allowed to occur. The test program had been utterly destroyed and the future of the entire project thrown into doubt.

The baroness would hold Garhardt responsible. And the baroness was a vindictive woman.

Garhardt had told the entire staff, except for those monitoring the pregnant women in the clinic, to get a good night’s sleep. She would telephone the baroness and relay her instructions to them the first thing in the morning.

It was now almost midnight, and she had not yet placed that call. She could not bring herself to do it.

She sat at her desk through the night, thinking. Around two o’clock she had an idea. She could order C-sections immediately for the remaining twenty-three women. If the infants could be transfused daily for several weeks, until their beta globin genes kicked in to replace the defective epsilons, they might be saved.

Some of them might be saved, anyway. Some would still probably be born dead, before transfusions could even begin. Maybe all of them would be born dead.

And what was the point? The mistake in Jupiter could be corrected and a second pilot program begun, but for Garhardt herself it was too late.

The damage was done. It could not be hidden.

At four o’clock in the morning, groggy from lack of sleep and the heavy doses of tranquilizer she had been injecting, Laura Garhardt decided that she had had enough . . . more than she could bear.

‘ She mixed a lethal amount of tranquilizer in the hypodermic syringe, twisted a tube around her forearm to get a good bulge in a vein, and injected the drug into her bloodstream.

In a matter of minutes the small office around her grew dim and muffled and began to fade from her sight. She folded her arms on her desk and laid her head on top of them. She felt dreamy-then weightless, serene.

She drifted into a deep sleep. From sleep she slipped into a coma.

Dr. Hartmann found her dead at her desk at eight A.M. o Dalton Stewart opened his eyes but didn’t move. It was still dark in the room. For a few seconds he thought he was in his bedroom on Long Island.

He stared up into the dark. His head felt swollen and sore, and he could hear the blood pulsing in his ears. He was in the middle of the worst hangover he could remember.

He felt confused as well. He squinted at the bedside clock. It was just past seven in the morning, and he was still in Munich.

He remembered waking up some time in the middle of the night. He had a vague recollection that he had talked with Ajemian. Ajemian had told him something about Anne. He couldn’t remember what it was. Maybe he had dreamed it. He pressed his palms against his eyes to shut out the painful daylight. No. It had been something important.